Black Primary care physicians

Five percent of active physicians in the United States identified as Black or African American in 2018 [3]. That is the supply side. The demand side has been measured too, and it does not say what people assume.

In a randomized study in Oakland, Black men were offered a free health screening and assigned either a Black doctor or a doctor of another race. Before meeting anyone, both groups selected a similar set of preventive services. After the consultation, the men who had met a Black doctor were much more likely to accept every service offered, and the difference was largest for the invasive ones. The authors estimate that at scale the effect could narrow the Black and white gap in male cardiovascular deaths by about 19 percent [1]. The same care sat on the table in both rooms. It was taken up more often in one of them.

The county-level picture points the same way. A study of 1,618 US counties that had at least one Black primary care physician found that a 10 percent increase in Black primary care physician representation was associated with 30.61 more days of life expectancy among Black residents, 12.71 fewer deaths per 100,000, and a 1.2 percent smaller Black and white gap in all-cause mortality [2]. That is an association measured across counties, not a promise about any one appointment. It is also the same direction as the Oakland trial, arrived at by a completely different method.

None of this says a physician of another race cannot look after you well. It says that concordance changes what gets offered, what gets accepted, and how often a person comes back, and those three things are what a lifetime of primary care adds up to.